Posts Tagged ‘David Hoffman

Here’s another story in the Tribune about efforts underway behind the scenes to force Alexi Giannoulias to abandon his Senate candidacy, since his whole family seems sure to go down with Broadway Bank’s failure. The assumption is that once the feds take over the bank, all of the Giannouliases’ crime connections will come to light, and the public will know the full extent of everything the Giannoulias Family did for the mob in Chicago.

The Tribune is largely written by interns and kindergarteners these days, so take it for what it is worth, but here’s the gist of what it says:

(1) Giannoulias is going to be dumped as the Senate candidate — which we’ve believed for some time will happen.

(2) Lisa Madigan will turn down a chance to run for the Senate — honestly, we don’t know enough about the Madigans to say whether that is true or not. She’s ambitious, but for whatever reason never seems to want to make any of the power moves people forever insist she’s plotting. Maybe she just loves the attention all this speculation gives her and all she wants is to be Attorney General. Or, maybe she wants Bill Brady to beat Pat Quinn for Governor in the fall, so that she can run for Governor herself in 4 years and that’s the only ambition she has. But, if she wanted the Senate nomination, her father the villainous Mike Madigan, Speaker of the Illinois House, would surely give it to her.

(3) The article says yet again that Rahm Emanuel could be the Senate pick — which we think is ridiculous. Giannoulias is not going to enjoy being pushed to the side, so if we were him, we’d do everything we could to tear down whomever replaced us. People in Illinois don’t like Emanuel to begin with, and Republicans especially can’t stand him…so there’s an awful lot about Emanuel that would come out in any campaign. It would not be like running for his Congressional seat. The stakes are much, much higher. Screaming at people naked in the showers is not the full extent of Emanuel’s nude adventures with men.

(4) Bill Daley, the imperial mayor’s brother, is the other candidate the Tribune thinks would take Giannoulias’ place. There’s no love for the Daley family in this state. Daley is a nice enough man, but he’s a buffoon a large part of the time. Good luck with that one, we say.

(5) David Hoffman is put down by the Tribune, even though we know for a fact his campaign staff from the primary has not found other jobs and is waiting to work for him again, for SOMETHING. The Tribune notes how shrill and childish Hoffman comes off in interviews, and we have to say we agree with that characterization. He is certainly someone we like on paper, and we like the people working for him, but there’s a reason we ourselves didn’t volunteer for his campaign. After we met him at an event, we realized what an ass he is in person. He’d probably make a great Senator, but life’s much too short to spend what little free time we have campaigning for an ass. Maybe he’ll get that under control someday. We hope so. If he was nicer to people, maybe he would have won the primary against Giannoulias in the first place.

(6) It’s a major slam against the lackluster Mark Kirk campaign that the Tribune thinks either Emanuel or Daley would mop the floor with Kirk in November, once either of them took Giannoulias’ place. Just think about that for a minute. The Tribune is saying Kirk’s campaign would lose to someone who has such a late start, coming in at the last minute after the Democrat candidate was forced out of the race under great scandal. And Kirk STILL can’t win, after all of that. This says a lot more about Kirk than it does about either Emanuel or Daley. His campaign is terrible. He lies to voters every single day about his Cap & Tax vote and what made him do that, not to mention how he’d vote in the future. He’s rude in person, and he uses his reserve service in the National Guard to deflect any question he doesn’t want to answer. Ask him something about Cap & Tax and he’ll start talking about what the food in Afghanistan is like instead. Try it. You’ll see. It’s shameless. He is a true caricature of a speaking out of both sides of his mouth, never telling the truth, shameless liar of a politician.

We’re not so sure about that. At least we’d know where Hoffman and Daley honestly stand on issues…and neither of them pulls the “instead of answering your question, I’ll talk about being int he reserves” garbage.

We still bet all of this will be resolved by Easter, and Giannoulias will be forced to resign the nomination.

Here’s a recap of some of the things we’ve told you, that we’ve picked up on the ground here in Chicago the last month or so:

(1) Alexi Giannoulias is unable to attract more than 12 people to a fundraiser in the city, and 10 of the people there are waiters and bartenders, and the other two are Giannoulias and his aide. That means, to us, that he’s going to withdraw as the Senate nominee, because he will not fund his own campaign. We’ve been at political fundraising long enough to know that if a candidate has a disastrous string of events where few people show up, that candidate leaves the race. That’s what we think is going to happen to Giannoulias.

(2) The guys we know who worked for David Hoffman’s campaign for the Democrat Senate nomination have not found new jobs yet. They aren’t working for Hoffman anymore, technically, and aren’t getting paid anymore, but seem to be in limbo waiting for SOMETHING. There are plenty of campaigns these guys could get on, if not for a candidate than some issue. We don’t know what they are waiting for — and these guys do not have unlimited savings reserves. Most of us blew through any money we had stashed during the Hillary 2008 campaign, so being out of work for even a month must be hurting these guys. What are they waiting for? Why aren’t they getting new jobs? We think it’s because Hoffman’s going to be running for SOMETHING in 2010, just not the Senate.

We haven’t talked about Lisa Madigan for a while, because she hasn’t done anything terrible interesting in months, but she and her father Mike Madigan are always plotting and scheming something.

We should have known they’d be angling to get Lisa the Senate nomination.

It’s what BigJournalism thinks is up:

(1) Giannoulias will be forced to withdraw the nomination.

(2) The Democrat party in Illinois will pick his replacement in the race, and that replacement will be Lisa Madigan, since her father controls who gets picked as the replacement.

(3) Lisa Madigan is the current attorney general in Illinois and is currently running for re-election; David Hoffman will take Madigan’s place as the AG candidate once she’s bumped up to the Senate nominee.

THAT fits perfectly with what we’ve been noticing, in terms of the Hoffman supporters sitting in limbo for now. It makes perfect sense they’d be waiting to work his AG campaign, which would essentially be his Senate campaign shifted to AG instead. We wouldn’t be surprised if he was already printing up his posters and flyers.

BigJournalism conjectures this is what Democrats planned all along, knowing Giannoulias would be a terrible Senate candidate, with all of his mob ties through his family’s mob-bank, Broadway Bank. We always wondered how Democrats thought Giannoulias could survive a Senate campaign with so much dirt on him, but figured Democrats believed Mark Kirk would be such a terrible Republican candidate that they might squeak by with a victory.

We were right about Kirk: he’s running one of the worst, off-the-radar, invisible campaigns we’ve ever seen. Most people we know don’t even realize Republicans are fielding a candidate for Senate. Those that are aware Kirk is running only know about him because they’re still so angry over his Cap & Tax vote.

We think BigJournalism is right, and the mystery of Alexi Giannoulias’ run has been solved: Democrats always intended to replace him with Lisa Madigan, who got to dodge a primary fight and save her resources for the general election.

Madigan has as many secrets and skeletons in her closet as Kirk does, so the two of them can be sure to not bring any of that to light against one another. It’s a very interesting scenario, actually. There’s mutually-assured destruction for both of them, so it’s almost the US-USSR Cold War in terms of the lines the two will draw in the sand and what they both will agree to never talk about.

That would not have happened with Giannoulias.

We’re not sure how Kirk beats Madigan in the Senate race. While it’s long been her dream to be Governor, maybe she’ll do a stint in the Senate and then run against Bill Brady when he’s up for re-election, as the feeling right now is that Brady will defeat sitting Governor Quinn in November.

The BigJournalim piece really made the puzzle come together with this…leaving just one question left unanswered, and that’s when exactly Giannoulias will withdraw.

The key to taking down bad Democrats is cutting off their revenue streams.

Apply pressure to donors, keep the donors from giving money to these lunatics, and bad Democrats just go away.

They will NOT self-finance their own campaigns. If wealthy, misguided, celebrity-obsessed people in cities like Chicago, who give money to campaigns because they want their pictures taken with famous people, don’t want to be associated with a candidate who is getting bad press and whose picture they can’t be proud to have on their walls, then they won’t give those people any money.

As everything about the corrupt, insolvent, mob funding Broadway Bank has finally made news, Alexi Giannoulias has become a pariah in Chicago. He holds fundraisers where more waiters and bartenders are in attendance than paying guests.

He is not long for the political scene.

We have no idea who will replace him, but the fact Chicago is a buzz today with talk of WHO will replace him means he’s a dead man walking.

Something to think about: last night we ran into two guys we know from Hillary’s 2008 campaign who worked for David Hoffman, who Giannoulias defeated in the primary for the Democrats’ nomination. We asked them what campaign they are working now, because these guys usually jump onto a new political ship when one campaign ends. They don’t have a new candidate yet. They don’t have new jobs yet.

We think they are waiting for Hoffman to take Giannoulias’ place in the Senate race. It does not appear Hoffman’s team has disbanded, and could be waiting for more shoes to drop on Giannoulias before they give up on Hoffman for good.

We deeply regret not getting involved in the Illinois primaries for Governor and Senate candidates, respectively, Adam Andrzejewski (R) and David Hoffman (D).

These two men are whom Illinois should send to Springfield and Washington.

We’ve met Andrzejewski numerous times here in Chicago at various events for the last year and a half, and found him to be, sincerely, the nicest man we have ever known who is involved in politics. He is kind, smart, articulate, well-read, and has a sincere PASSION inside him for tearing open the books in Illinois and auditing the waste and corruption in this state, for every man, woman, and child to see. He wants no stone unturned, no one protected, and has said repeatedly that if elected he would, at last, reveal to the people just how bad things are in Springfield…and, by extension, Chicago.

We don’t know how to put into words the WHY, regarding what kept us from getting involved in an Andrzejewski campaign. In retrospect, he is exactly the sort of person we want in government. If he wins the GOP primary on Tuesday, we plan on campaigning for him, every day, for Governor. We will go all-in for Andrzejewski…to make up for not doing anything for him in the primaries.

It’s just that we never thought Illinois would elect another Governor with a hard to spell and pronounce last name, after just booting Rod Blagojevich. So, we dismissed Andrzejewski outright, when we shouldn’t have. We also, to be honest, thought the guy was JUST TOO DAMN NICE to ever win. With a lot on our plates, we didn’t feel like sinking our hearts into the campaign of someone we like very much, who was not going to win. On a personal level, it’s hard to weather disappointments like that repeatedly. The Clinton campaign, then Palin’s bid for VP, took a lot out of us.

We also didn’t want to commit to any races in Illinois for the simple fact that living here, and getting involved in any of the races, means putting ourselves even more on the line than we already do, because local races stir local passions, and we didn’t want to make all sorts of new enemies so close to home. It was our intention to observe the goings-on here in Illinois, but not be an active participant in them, the way we chose to do with the Massachusetts Senate race.

That was a good decision for us at the time, but we’ve changed our minds about things in the last few days.

For starters, we can’t state enough how much the support we’ve received from all of you has encouraged us, and in some ways even altered the courses of our lives. In doing the Breitbart and Andrea Shae King interviews last week, so many calls and emails told us our strategic insights and focus on elections mattered a great deal to them…and they let us know they wanted us to work harder, put out more action items, and directly involve ourselves in more campaigns where we side with a good, patriotic, fiscally responsible American running against someone we don’t trust in office.

That person, our candidate, can be from either party…and maybe in the future, that person will be from no party at all.

Something is happening to us that we didn’t expect, and it’s happening faster than we could have ever believed.

We are really and truly starting to look at the candidates themselves, for the first time ever, and not the letter that falls after their names or the red or blue bunting their campaigns are decorated in. We can like, support, and work our hearts for good Democrats when we see them. If we ever see them again. We can, also, work hard for good Republicans…like Sarah Palin…Michelle Bachmann…Scott Brown…and Adam Adrzejewski (have to check how to spell that every time we try to type it, but Adam’s worth it).

We should have been rooting for, and revving people up to get behind, Adrzejewski a year ago. We should have, after meeting him for the first time, come straight back to Buzzquarters and told all of you to get off your butts and do whatever you could to build buzz for this guy…because he is not only a kind, polite, and wonderful man, but he’s also gutsy enough to take on the institutionalized corruption in this state…making him the only candidate running who’d ever do anything like that.

Adrzejewski is the real deal. If he does not win the primary tomorrow, it will be a great loss for this state. We will very much regret not doing anything for him in the primaries…but swear that the next time he runs, for anything, we will be there for him in spades, because we have come to see clearly that he’s just who we need in office. To be honest, we need a whole slew of future candidates like him. Even if we’ll never be able to spell his name without having to check back if we came anywhere even close to being correct.

We have the same regret that we didn’t back David Hoffman for the Democrat primary. Hoffman, like Adrzejewski is a very good man. He, too, is polite, smart, engaging, respectful, and wicked smart. We know people working for his campaign, and they’ve always reported back that, as a candidate, he treats his staff well, listens to voters, and “is the real deal”.

We regret not giving Hoffman our time. We were convinced Giannoulias and the Chicago machine had everything all sewn up. If Hoffman scores an upset and beats Giannoulias, we’ll think about campaigning for him for the Senate, depending on whom the Republicans end up with. If it’s Mark Kirk on the GOP side, versus Hoffman, we’re going to back Hoffman. Kirk’s Cap & Tax vote, in our mind, makes him ineligible for serving in the Senate, permanently. It was such a poor decision, such proof of bad judgment, it’s as if we saw Kirk drunk driving down the highway right before coming to us asking to be hired to drive a school bus. We just don’t trust this man with a vote in the Senate, not after the decision he made on Cap & Tax.

If it’s indeed Giannoulias versus Kirk, as seems likely tomorrow, then Kirk is the better choice. It will indeed be hold-your-nose to vote time on this one. As poor of a Senator as Kirk will be, he is still not scion of the mob banking Giannoulias family.

Case closed, there.

We can’t ever campaign FOR Kirk, but we believe we’ll feel compelled to rally people AGAINST Giannoulias. If Kirk wins, we hope against hope he does not end up in the Olympia Snow, Susan Collins, Arlen Specter niche of the Republican party, the way we feel he’s destined. Perhaps all the anger directed against him for his Cap & Tax vote sank in, and he’s changed his tune. Possibly to something from ABBA. We wish Republicans picked better people to run in Illinois, because the voters deserve better than Kirk.

In the future, we feel the need to make sure we do everything possible for good people like Adam Adrzejewski and David Hoffman early in the process, so that voters DO get to have better candidates than Kirk, Giannoulias, or other terrible choices like Rosanna Pulido (whom the GOP ran for Rahm Emanuel’s vacated Congressional seat last year).

We need to stop letting “he or she can’t win” keep us from generating that buzz for people we believe in. We need to use our time, energy, and passion for people we want to see in office, regardless of party, and without factoring in hypothetical odds of their success.

The best candidate, in every race, period should get our attention.

And, logically, we really should involve ourselves more here in Illinois, since we have access to so much more information, and the candidates themselves, here in Chicago. From there, we should center our focus always on the Midwest, and then nationally on races where we have personal connections through HillBuzz.

This way, we are making the absolute most of all resources, and getting as much inside scoop as possible to strategize, organize, and write about these races for maximum impact.

We hope you chime in on good candidates you see on the horizon more often, so if someone’s not on our radar, we can take a good look at that person, regardless of party, and see if he or she is worth putting energy into.

If we keep mobilizing people to get behind good candidates who want to take down the corruption and radicalism in our system, and if we can encourage others out there to do that too, together we believe we can really start to make a difference.

We dropped the ball with Adrzejewski and Hoffman, but don’t intend to do that again in the future.

We can’t change the last few months, but we can learn from them and direct our energies better in the years ahead.